“Strip” Bingo

Get your students’ attention with the name of this quick version of BINGO!

OVERVIEW:

Turn a reading into a competitive game with this twist on traditional BINGO. I learned this activity from Kristin Duncan, who re-posted it on her blog after reading a post by Andrea (surname?) on the MoreTPRS listserv in March 2013.

If you want to avoid scrutiny…call it RIP BINGO instead 🙂

PREPARATION:

Teacher chooses a text or list of words/phrases in the target language. (If it is a text, pull out key words and phrases and show them to students in list form; If it is a list, show it to the students in scrambled order.)

Students tear off a strip from a piece of paper. (To give you an idea, it could be 2” by 11”…but it really doesn’t matter.)

Students divide the strip of paper into 5 boxes.

Students write down one word or phrase from the teacher’s list in each box.

GAME PLAY:

The teacher SLOWLY reads aloud the text or list that contains the target language words and phrases from the list that students saw in preparation step #1. (If it is a text, pause after each sentence or clause (if the sentences are long); If it is a list, pause after each item (word or phrase) in the list.)

When the teacher pauses, ALL students call out what the word or phrase means in English

If one of the words or phrases that was spoken before that pause is written on one end of a student’s paper (the far right or far left), that student can tear off that word or phrase from their strip. If it is one of the words or phrases in the middle of his or her strip, the student may not tear it off.

The first person to have all of their words called and torn off and their last word ripped in half wins! You might have to read through the list several times in order to find a winner.

KEEP IN MIND:

If you want to “guarantee” (more-or-less) that you will have to read through the text several times before there is a winner, have students make more than five boxes on their strip.

Remember that texts that are highly repetitious will make for a faster game, because students will have multiple opportunities to tear off the words and phrases that are repeated in the text. To avoid this, you could simply exclude the highest frequency vocabulary from the list given to students when creating their strips.

Profe Hanson used it to read Chapter 12 of La Llorona de Mazatlán. Her students chose five words from a word bank of nine words (mujer, enojada, chica, tía, miró, de repente, volver/volvió, había, oí) to write on their strip, and then she read the chapter aloud to them as they followed along in their novels.